Integrated Data
for Events Analysis

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Background

The IDEA event form typology is a conceptual framework
for use in coding social, economic and political events data.
The IDEA framework is an extension and a refinement of, and is congruent with the World
Event / Interaction Survey or WEIS. Like WEIS, IDEA is nominally scaled,
but unlike WEIS the event forms in IDEA are not bound to state actors,
though some event forms are intrinsically bound to specific actors like armed
forces when they engage in a battle. To be clear, the WEIS event form, reduction in relations,
represents a diplomatic behavior and therefore represents diplomatic action, but the IDEA equivalent, reduce routine activity, refers
to such reductions by individuals, groups or organizations, both state and
non-state.

The congruence with WEIS is embodied in what are referred
to as WEIS "cue" categories, the 2-digit numeric codes numbered 1-22. Aside
from some minor label changes, these 22 event form categories remain essentially
the same (but free of the actor bound definitions) to WEIS; and like
WEIS, we generally consider these cue categories to be residuals,
to be coded only if the lower level
distinctions cannot be made.

The extension of WEIS
is represented by 2-digit residual categories beginning with number 23, and extending (with
breaks) to 99. The first additions made were the PANDA events that embodied the
contentious and coercive but not yet violent aspects of conflict. PANDA was
superseded by IDEA in its first version. Next, the event forms from Charles Taylor's World Handbook of
Social and Political Indicators were added, administrative adjustments, for example. In addition, we
added categories deemed important in that they represented distinctive sets
of behavior (for example, voting and judicial behaviors), and these are true residuals in
that we have created them primarily as placeholders until we can engage scholars in these areas to
help us flesh out the sub-forms. We also added in the previous version of
IDEA a handful of economic behaviors (with very crude lower-form
distinctions, again as placeholders). Likewise, we added a number of detailed event forms
for mass protest behaviors, guided largely by the work of Craig Jenkins.
Finally, we added a series of non-human phenomena (like natural disasters and
accidents) and (animal) behaviors, used primarily to track biomedical phenomena
such as the benign or malicious spread of toxins or disease.

The current (July 2002) version of IDEA adjusts a number of
operational definitions, merging a few events and adding numerous others, based on our experience over the past year.
This July 2002 version also explicitly integrates virtually all of the CAMEO event forms
as published the January 2002 release available from the Kansas Events Data
System Project website and updated slightly in the March 2002 ISA paper by
Deborah Gerner and others. Thus cooperative actions, particularly those involving
mediation, are much better covered in this version. With this version too, we
have also made available the IDEA equivalents for each of the following event
data frameworks: CAMEO, MID, WEIS and World Handbook.

IDEA event forms represent the lowest level
of specificity that current (circa 2002) machine coding can accomplish with
precision at least equal
to large-scale human coding exercises. Our goal
in this collaborative effort is to offer a coherent framework with the lowest
level or "common denominator" event forms used in the major nominal frameworks
cited above. Equivalent events for the major ordinally-scaled alternative
framework, COPDAB, can be generated by using a weight applied to each nominal
event form similar to what Joshua Goldstein did in his 1992 JPR
article. framework. Thus by generating events using the IDEA
framework, one
can map the coding back to any of the major event data frameworks still in
use.

At the very least, we hope
this approach facilitates peer review and independent assessment of
alternative events data sets. Such an approach stands in contrast to the present
situation in which review and testing is not possible across the
numerous, competing efforts being conducted today, including proprietary schemes
(when done in the commercial sector), secret (when done in some agencies of
governments) and even across the open frameworks used by many in the
academy, in part because they are not cross-mapped, and in part because human
coding does not lend itself well to replication by others.

The July 2002 version is the third major revision since IDEA was first outlined in 1998. The
framework below is posted as an ongoing draft, with comments, suggestions
and extensions welcome. Thanks in advance. Please e-mail questions or comments to
Doug Bond.